fingers
nervously together; "but oftenest he--he speaks of singing, and I can't
quite understand that, for he didn't ever sing, you know."

"Singing? What does he say?" The man asked the question because he saw
that it was affording the overwrought little woman real relief to free
her mind; but at the first words of her reply he became suddenly alert.

"It's 'his song,' as he calls it, that he talks about, always. It isn't
much--what he says--but I noticed it because he always says the same
thing, like this: I'll just hold up my chin and march straight on and
on, and I'll sing it with all my might and main.' And when I ask him
what he's going to sing, he always says, 'My song--my song,' just like
that. Do you think, Mr. Jack, he did have--a song?"

For a moment the man did not answer. Something in his throat tightened,
and held the words. Then, in a low voice he managed to stammer:--

"I think he did, Mrs. Holly, and--I think he sang it, too." The next
moment, with a quick lifting of his hat and a murmured "I'll call again
soon," he turned and walked swiftly down the driveway.

So very swiftly, indeed, was Mr. Jack walking, and so self-absorbed was
he, that he did not see the carriage until it was almost upon him; then
he stepped aside to let it pass. What he saw as he gravely raised his
hat was a handsome span of black horses, a liveried coachman, and a
pair of startled eyes looking straight into his. What he did not see
was the quick gesture with which Miss Holbrook almost ordered her
carriage stopped the minute it had passed him by.

CHAPTER XXII

AS PERRY SAW IT

One by one the days passed, and there came from the anxious watchers at
David's bedside only the words, "There's very little change." Often
Jack Gurnsey went to the farmhouse to inquire for the boy. Often, too,
he saw Perry Larson; and Perry was never loath to talk of David. It was
from Perry, indeed, that Gurnsey began to learn some things of David
that he had never known before.

"It does beat all," Perry Larson said to him one day, "how many folks
asks me how that boy is--folks that you'd never think knew him, anyhow,
ter say nothin' of carin' whether he lived or died. Now, there's old
Mis' Somers, fur instance. YOU know what she is--sour as a lemon an'
puckery as a chokecherry. Well, if she didn't give me yesterday a great
bo-kay o' posies she'd growed herself, an' said they was fur him--that
they berlonged ter him, anyhow.

"'Course, I